General agreement with some of the points raised below. Just to further
clarify on the subject of residuals...they diminish with time. The first
rerun on broadcast gets you about 45% of the original price of the script.
Then it begins falling pretty fast. My most recent residual for one of my
Twilight Zone episodes was about fifteen dollars.

And also correct; while the pay can sometimes be good, remember that
things cost more in LA than anywhere but New York. Even a small (1 or 2
bedroom) house, in a not altogether terrific neighborhood, in not terribly
great shape, will run you $200,000 or more. Ren on a small two-bedroom
apartment (make that rent) generally runs $900 and up.

That's one of the real dangers of this town; you can have a year or two
where you earn good money. You even manage to sock some away. Then you have
a year or two when you don't work, and if you lived anywhere else, you could
get by pretty easily on that. But here, it's gone with astonishing speed.
And then of course your agent gets 10%, the government gets 40-50%...you know
the drill.

And there's always somebody trying to find some new and creative way to
screw writers. Here's a forinstance: I did Murder, She Wrote for two years.
Network fees for a one-hour script are about $20,000, rounded off. Second run
is about 40-50% when you hit syndication. So figure that that check should be
about $9,500. Not bad. Except Universal realized one day that it'd be better
off selling the show to itself, in the form of the USA Network, co-owned by
Universal. Cable residuals are figured on a PERCENTAGE basis, meaning you get
a percentage of the overall sale price of the series to cable, per episode
you've written. And Universal sells the show to itself at the lowest
conceivable price (about $500 per episode, give or take).

So what is my residual on a second-run of a Murder episode on USA, which
would be about $9,500 on a broadcast station? Twenty four dollars and change.

But hey...it's Hollywood, Jake.

jms